My memories of literary agenting are of a very happy time and there are surprising reminders of it coming back now.
My favorite kind of science fiction is post-apocalyptic dystopia. But I just heard at the bar that genre is going out of style. Frankly, that’s not a future I want to live in.
I wish she were alive, but I am grateful for her death. If she were alive, I would likely still be working at the literary agency. For how much longer in my life would I have believed there was time for everything? And by the time I faced my own mortality at the Bookmill in western Massachusetts, how much less would I have done? Her leaving taught me about the worst sadness, one we all must face eventually. I feel lucky I am better equipped to help others who are going through it now.
Yale was founded before the advent of the fraternity system, so the white men of generations past had to make up their own structures for sub-erotic bonding and pointless tribalism.
There are transitions in life whether we want them or not. You get older. You lose jobs and loves and people. The story of your life may change dramatically, tragically, or so quietly you don’t even notice. It’s never any fun, but it can’t be avoided. Sometimes you just have to walk into the cold dark water of the unfamiliar and suffer for a while.
This country is founded on some very noble ideals but also some very big lies. One is that everyone has a fair chance at success. Another is that rich people have to be smart and hardworking or else they wouldn’t be rich. Another is that if you’re not rich, don’t worry about it, because rich people aren’t really happy. I am the white male living proof that all of that is garbage.
I grew to really love the exquisite humiliation of auditioning. When you audition for a role, everything is organized around reminding you that you do not matter. It’s the best therapy I ever received.
Don’t concentrate on becoming a better humor writer, just concentrate on being the best writer that you can become. If you’re funny, the work will end up being funny. And if you’re not funny, the work will still end up being good. Concentrate on being the most honest writer you can be, and let everything else follow – because it will.
I am from Brookline, Massachusetts, but I was technically born in a hospital in Cambridge. So now you have a critical answer to many of my internet security questions. And as this book is about being honest with you for once, I will also tell you that my mother’s maiden name was Callahan. Enjoy my Amazon Prime account and all my money.
Whatever you may have thought about Hillary Clinton, my daughter watched as a highly experienced and qualified woman lost a job to a neophyte dilettante cartoon character of a white man who openly bragged of molesting women. My daughter isn’t dumb. She got the message.
He was over there making Yes album covers, and here I was, with my gaudy Trump Towers of rock junk.
This is a book about me, at what I hope is the beginning of the second half of my life and not the brief, final tenth.
Jonathan is a musician and my best friend. I hope he does not read that last part. I would never call him my “best friend” to his face. I am from Massachusetts and he is from Connecticut, and New Englanders do not say things like that.
The sun touches Maine first among every state in the US. But Maine likes to confuse people and generally feels conflicted on the subject of light and warmth, so its shattered coastline of necks and points and isles hides from the sun, facing any direction but east.
These violent delights will have violent ends!” My son didn’t get the Westworld reference.
You may think it’s enough to just read Val Kilmer’s wine blog and drink whatever he recommends. And for the most part, you would be right. But sometimes Val Kilmer gets confused and drinks Thousand Island salad dressing, and so it’s important to develop your own palate as well.
A public road had been closed to us so that a rich man could watch the Super Bowl in his playhouse and show his rich friends the nuclear football.
It is a consuming knowledge, an overwhelming sadness for what is lost that makes enjoyment of the present impossible.
For some people, status is what protects them from oblivion. And when they feel their status is slipping away from them, they act fearfully, irrationally.
I love my father. It’s not his fault that he made up a fear and, in order to make it feel more real to him, gave it to me. I was obviously built to receive it.
As a father now myself, it’s sobering to think about how the smallest comments will ripple through your children’s lives, with some leaving permanent warps. I must console myself in the certainty that I am helping them and damaging them in other ways I cannot see.